


Into the Wild

by southsidewrites



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Bromance, Brotp, Camping, Comedy, Cute, Dilton saves the day, Friendship, Funny, Gen, Humor, Lost in the Woods, The Southside Serpents, adventures while camping, camping fail, fox forest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 03:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14926208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/southsidewrites/pseuds/southsidewrites
Summary: “Go camping,” they said.“It’ll be fun,” they said.Two friends set out on the bonding adventure of a lifetime–no phones, no idea how to work a map, and absolutely no camping abilities.What could possibly go wrong?





	Into the Wild

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for checking this out! A lot of this is based on my many camping fails, so I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
> 
> Written for Day Four of @buggiebreak's Southside Showcase.

**_Friday, 11am_ **

“Alright, and you’re sure that you two have everything you need?” Toni asked, looking over her friends with a wary expression.

“Yes, mom,” Fangs groaned, smirking at Sweet Pea.

“We’ll be fine, T.  I don’t know why you’re so worried,” Sweet Pea added.

“Excuse me for being worried—it’s not like you two are master outdoorsmen.”

“It’s literally just Fox Forest,” Sweet Pea said, giving her a skeptical look. “What could possibly go wrong?”

“Oh shit, man, why’d you go and say that?” Jughead asked, looking up from his laptop where he had been typing away on something. “Now something almost has to go wrong.”

“Bullshit,” Sweet Pea scoffed. “We have a tent, food, water purifiers, a map, a compass, spare clothes, flint, and literally every other stupid thing on the list Toni made.  We’re going to be fine.”

Jughead’s lips curved into a half-grin. “Do you two even know how to work a map?”

“I swear, Jones, I’ll—”

“Hey, chill,” Fangs ordered, holding out a hand to keep Sweet Pea from tackling Jughead.  Then, he gave Jughead a pointed look. “Yes, Jughead, we know how to work a map.”

“Just wondering.” He shrugged and returned to his work. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you when you’re lost in the wilderness, never to return.”

“Okay, that’s it, I’m over this.  Fangs, let’s go.” Sweet Pea shouldered his massive camping backpack, clipping all the straps together so it wouldn’t fall off. “See you guys on Sunday.”

“We better see you,” Toni said, pulling Fangs close for another hug. “If we don’t—I’m sending the State Park Rangers.”

“We’ll be fine, Toni, I promise,” Fangs said, giving her shoulders a reassuring squeeze. “It’s just camping.”

“And you’re sure you can set up the tent?”

“You only made us do it seventeen million times,” Sweet Pea groaned as he clipped on his motorcycle helmet. “Seriously, Topaz, chill before you give yourself an aneurysm.”

Toni gave him a stern look. “Just be careful, Pea, okay?”

“I will,” he promised. “Now, we’re leaving for real this time.  See you guys later.”

“See you later,” Toni replied softly.  She watched as the two boys loaded up and got on their bikes.  Then, with a final wave, they were gone.

“We’re never going to see them again, you know,” Jughead mused.

“Don’t say that!” she snapped. “They make dumb enough choices when they’re not stranded in the woods—Lord only knows how much dumber they’ll be out there.”

“I’m sure they’ll be fine, Toni,” he drawled, still looking at the screen of his laptop. “And if not, hey, at least we’ll have a funny story to tell.”

“In what fucked up world would that be funny?”

“Because I told them so.”

* * *

 

**_Friday, 12pm_ **

Fangs took a deep breath, relishing the fresh air as he climbed off his bike and started walking to the State Park Trailhead. “Damn, it’s a nice day out.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Sweet Pea agreed.  Once he had everything he needed loaded up into his backpack, he joined Fangs at the edge of the parking lot near the trailhead.  The two started walking, taking in the quiet of the park.  While Riverdale wasn’t a major city or anything, it still felt good to be out of town, away from all the stress of back home.  The two stopped when the reached the edge of the pavement.

“Well, this is it—we now walk into the wild.”

“Isn’t that from that movie where the dude dies in a bus in Alaska or something?”

“It was a book too, Sweet Pea.”

“How the fuck was I supposed to know that?”

“We read it in English this year.”

“Oh did we?  What do ya know?” He grinned and started walking. “Either way, I didn’t read it.”

“Shocker.”

* * *

 

**_Friday, 2pm_ **

“Sweet Pea, we’ve been walking _forever_ ,” Fangs groaned, his feet thumping against the packed dirt trail with every step. “Are we there yet?”

“We have not been walking forever,” Sweet Pea grumbled, swatting a fly away from his face. “Not only is it only like 2:00, we stopped back at the lake for like a half hour because _someone_ needed to take an absurd amount of aesthetic pictures for Instagram.”

“Hey, that lighting made me look great,” Fangs argued. “And it was not a half hour.”

“Felt like it.”

“For real, though, how close are we to the campsite?”

“I dunno.  Let’s get the map out.” He shrugged his backpack off his shoulders and dug around until he found the massive forest map that Toni had bought them.  Carefully unfolding it, Sweet Pea laid the massive piece of paper on the ground, doing his best to orient it correctly.

“So, where are we?” Fangs asked, crouching down next to his friend to look.

“I don’t know,” Sweet Pea snapped. “Let’s look for the trailhead and work from there.”

“Good plan.” For a moment, they two of them studied the map, running their fingers along the edges and murmuring to themselves.  Finally, Fangs broke the silence. “Pea, where’s the trailhead?”

“I was hoping you found it.”

“Nope.”

“Well, fuck.  Maybe we can find that lake we stopped at.”

“Dude, there’s like a hundred lakes on this map.”

“Okay, fine, fuck the lake, and fuck the map, too.” Sweet Pea stood up, folding the map and shoving it back in his pack. “We’ve been on one trail the whole time, and it’s been pretty well marked.  Let’s just keep hiking, and we’ll have to come across a good place to camp eventually, right?”

“Makes sense,” Fangs agreed.  He was shifting from foot to foot, his forehead creasing with anxiety. “Betty did say the best spots were about a three-hour hike out, right?”

“Yeah, she did, didn’t she?” Sweet Pea replied, his confidence increasing. “So we’ve got at least another hour or two, seeing as we probably move about as fast as the average six-year-old out here.

“You’re right,” Fangs agreed.  He re-shouldered his pack and looked up at Sweet Pea. “So, we keep walking.”

“Exactly.  We keep walking.  Fuck the map.”

* * *

 

**_Friday, 5pm_ **

“I swear to fucking God, Sweet Pea, if you don’t stop being a picky-ass bitch, I will throw you in the next lake we see.”

“I am not that picky,” Sweet Pea fumed. “I just don’t want to put our tent down underneath a tree that was obviously going to fall if the wind fucking tickled it.”

“Oh, so that’s a concern, but pitching it in a literal marsh was fine.”

“It was just a little damp, Fogarty.”

“ _You’re_ a little damp, Sweet Pea.”

Sweet Pea turned around, his fists clenching at his sides. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Fangs pulled himself up to tallest height.  He was still a good half foot shorter than Sweet Pea, but he was bulkier, and he intended to use that to his advantage. “It means that you’re—”

_CRACK_

“What the hell was that?” Fangs started looking around, his bravado dropping at the loud noise.

“Probably just a tree falling, dumbass.”

“Don’t call me a dumbass, dumbass.”

Sweet Pea groaned, running his hand through his hair.  It was cooling off as the sun started sinking toward the horizon. “Shit, dude, whatever, we just need to find a spot before it gets dark out here.  Setting up that tent was hard enough in daylight in my yard.  I don’t even want to think about us trying to do it at night on real terrain.”

“Good point.” Fangs sighed and readjusted his baseball cap. “Let’s keep moving.”

* * *

 

**_Friday, 8pm_ **

“That’s it, I give up,” Fangs sighed, collapsing in a heap on top of the shattered remains of their tent. “We lose—the tent bested us.”

“Not on my watch,” Sweet Pea grunted, hauling Fangs off the mess of poles and tarps. “We need to sleep somewhere tonight, Fangs.”

“I dunno,” Fangs sighed, laying back down and looking up at the stars starting to peak out of the night sky above them. “The ground is feeling pretty damn good.”

“Yeah, you say that now.” Sweet Pea pushed his sweaty hair out of his face and resumed fighting the tent. “What happens when a bear comes at us in the middle of the night?”

“Are you implying that a tent will save us from a bear?” Fangs asked, still not bothering to sit up. “Because I hate to break it to you, Pea, but it won’t.”

“It might dissuade it at the very least.”

“Doubtful.  That’s what the bear bags in our backpacks are for.  And unless you want to shrink to the size of a sandwich and slip in there, we’re out of luck.”

“Fine.” Sweet Pea tossed the tent poles aside with a groan. “Do you still have that hammock with you?”

“Yeah, why?”

“So we can sleep in it, duh.”

Fangs sat up slightly, quirking an eyebrow at his friend. “ _We?”_

“Yeah, we.  As in us.  Two.  You and me—you do speak English, right?”

“There’s no way in hell there’s room for both of us, dude.”

“It’s a two-man hammock, isn’t it?”

“Well, technically yeah, but that’s more like me and a girl, or maybe me and a guy shorter and/or skinnier than me.  Not me and your skyscraper-sized ass.”

“Here’s the deal, Fogarty—either I sleep in it alone or we both sleep in it.”

“What the hell kind of logic is that?” Fangs was fully upright now, craning his neck to look up at Sweet Pea. “It’s my hammock.”

“And it was my idea to sleep in it.”

“There’s a weight limit, you know.”

“Good thing I’m slim as fuck.”

“I’m not.”

“All the better for cuddling with.”

“Fuck you, Sweet Pea.”

“Not in the hammock, that’s for sure,” Sweet Pea laughed. “No maneuverability in those things.”

* * *

 

**_Friday, 10pm_ **

“Well, this is cozy,” Sweet Pea observed, stretching his sleeping bag-wrapped legs over Fangs’s chest. “Not too bad at all.”

The two of them were in the hammock together, heads on opposite ends and in their own sleeping bags.  In the small space, nearly every part of them was touching—their bodies resembled pretzels more than anything.

“I hate you, Sweet Pea.”

“Love you too, Fangsy.” Sweet Pea curled into his sleeping bag, surprised by how comfy he was. “Sleep tight—don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

Fangs grumbled in response. “’Night, Pea.”

* * *

 

**_Saturday, 2am_ **

“What the—Sweet Pea, wake up!”

“What—I—oh, fuck.”

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know—grab the tent?”

“What will that do?”

“We can toss it over ourselves and use it as a tarp!”

“Fuck, fine.” Fangs hauled his legs over the edge of the hammock and jumped. 

As soon as his feet hit the ground, he remembered he was in a sleeping bag.  The slippery material slid out under him, and he face-planted directly into the muddy ground.  The rain was falling hard now, pelting him with water droplets that felt like mini-bullets.  The wind whipped around them, and all he could hear was the sound of Sweet Pea laughing his ass off above him.

“I fucking hate camping.”

* * *

 

**_Saturday, 8am_ **

“I vote we call the whole thing now,” Sweet Pea said, tipping his head back on a pillow-sized rock. “This is just ridiculous.”

“Agreed,” Fangs said.  Like Sweet Pea, he was lying sprawled on some huge rocks near a lakeshore, every stitch of his clothing hanging on some nearby trees to dry.  Luckily, it was a hot, windy day, and their clothes seemed to be drying quickly.  In the meantime, they just lay there, completely naked and exposed to the elements while they waited.

Sweet Pea adjusted his sunglasses—the one thing he had left on—and sighed. “We really suck at camping, dude.”

“Agreed.”

“And the map’s completely trashed—no way that’s getting us home.”

“As if it did any good anyway.” Fangs groaned and rolled over.  Even though it was early, the sun was beating down, and he was heating up quickly. “At least the food stayed dry.”

“True,” Sweet Pea replied. “I have no fucking clue how we’re getting back, though.  That storm last night took down trees everywhere—the path is destroyed.”

“Fuck, you’re right.  Well, let’s be smart for the first time on this goddamn trip—we have a compass, so let’s just pick a direction and stick with it.  Eventually, we’ll be out of the park.”

“Okay, sure, but then we’re still in the biggest wilderness area in Upstate New York.  Fox Forest State Park is huge, due.  We could walk for days and never find the end.”

“Okay, so we go West, then,” Fangs went on. “Riverdale’s on the West end of Fox Forest, so if we go West, we’ll at least be going in the approximate direction.  Sure, we might walk out in Greendale or something, but that’s better than wandering to our deaths.”

“Valid point.”

“So, is that the plan?  Go West until something better comes up?”

“As good a plan as any, unless—” He cut off. “Shh, listen.”

“To what?”

“Just shut up and listen.”

In the distance and coming closer, there was the unmistakable sound of voices.  Female voices, to be exact, coming toward them.  Fangs and Sweet Pea both shot to their feet, completely forgetting that not only did they look like nature had just kicked their asses in the most unforgiving way, they were naked.

“Help!” Sweet Pea shouted. “Help us!”

“Over here!” Fangs added. “Help!”

The sounds got louder as the women hurried toward them, and within seconds, three women burst into the clearing.  Unlike Sweet Pea and Fangs, these three knew what they were doing, and they appeared to have made it through the night completely dry.

“Holy shit, Rach, they’re creeps,” one muttered.

One of the others was already backing away. “Don’t hurt us,” she squeaked.

The tallest one, Rachel, presumably, held her hands up as if to ward them off. “Stay away from us!” she shouted. “We have flares and knives, and I’m not afraid to use them.”

“Wait, no!” Sweet Pea lurched forward, and when his bare feet hit the rocky ground, he remembered. “Oh fuck, we’re not naked because we’re some creeps—our clothes are drying.”

“Sure thing, crazy,” one of the shorter women spat. “Let’s go.”  The three took off quickly, glancing over their shoulder in case of pursuit.

“No, wait!” Fangs and Sweet Pea took off after them, but without clothes, they didn’t stand a chance against the rocky ground and whipping tree branches.  They barely made it ten feet before they gave up.  Both were panting like they had just run miles.

“Fuck, that was our only chance,” Sweet Pea gasped, grabbing a tree to hold himself up. “We’re doomed.”

“Not doomed,” Fangs replied. “We have a plan.”

“Yeah, a shitty one.”

“Better than no plan.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

* * *

 

**_Saturday, 12pm_ **

“I spy with my little eye—”

“Fangs, one more time, and you’ll be spying a stick in your eye.”

“Jeez, just trying to lighten the mood.”

“The mood doesn’t need lightening,” Sweet Pea grumbled as he trudged through the brush. “It just sucks.”

“Well damn, sorry for trying.”  A few moments passed as they trudged in silence.  The only sounds were snaps and cracks of the branches they stepped on and the annoyingly cheerful birds that seemed to fill the trees.  Before long, Fangs started humming, and then…

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer.  Take one down—”

“FANGS, NO.”

* * *

 

**_Saturday, 3pm_ **

“This isn’t so bad,” Sweet Pea observed, looking down at the sight below them. 

The boys were sitting on the edge of a bluff overlooking a gorge.  Below them, a river was rushing.  The sun was still bright, and there was a cool breeze.  Fangs was eating a peanut butter sandwich as Sweet Pea ate an apple.  For a moment, they could forget how painfully lost they were because as they sat there, everything felt okay.

“It really isn’t,” Fangs agreed.  Once again, he was holding the map in front of him, trying to determine what River they were on based on compass directions alone. “Which way’s West again, Pea?”

“Um, that would be—fuck.”

There was a clattering, falling sound, and Fangs’s heart stopped. “Fuck what?”

“I may or may not have just dropped the compass.”

_“What?”_

“I may or may not have dropped the compass,” Sweet Pea repeated, quickly scooting away from the edge of the cliff. “But it’s okay—we know which way West is, right?”

 _“We know which way West is?”_ Fangs hissed, shoving off of the ground to stalk after Sweet Pea. “We have no fucking clue which way West is, you moron!”

“Fangs, Fangs, Fangs,” Sweet Pea pleaded, still crab-walking backward away from the cliff. “We’ll be fine—the sun sets in the West, right?  We just go that way.”

Fangs jerked to a stop, shaking his head. “We’re going to die out here.”

“No, we’re not,” Sweet Pea insisted, standing back up now that it appeared his friend no longer intended to push him off a cliff. “We’ll be fine.  We still have food for another day at least, more if we ration.”

“Okay, yeah, but what about the weather, exposure, _bears_?”

“We’ve got the hammock,” Sweet Pea answered, as if it were the answer to everything.

“Oh great,” Fangs laughed, his voice taking on that hysteric tone of someone so desperate they were laughing. “So instead of being a bear hamburger, we’ll be a bear taco.”

“Then we’ll just hang it higher in the trees.”

“Bears climb trees, Sweet Pea!” he shouted. “BEARS CLIMB TREES!”

* * *

 

**_Saturday, 7pm_ **

“This could be our last night alive, you know,” Fangs said, chewing slowly on a bite of chicken. “At least we’re going out in style with a real meal, cooked over a real fire.”

Sweet Pea gave him a skeptical look. “It’s canned chicken that we heated up, dumbass, that’s not a real meal.”

“It’s the realest I’ve had in ages.” He rested his sock-covered feet next to the fire. “If I have to die while camping, at least I can do it next to a warm fire.”

“C’mon, dude, you’re the one who read that Alaska book—we’re not dying tonight.  It’ll be at least a few weeks before we waste away, dying of starvation after eating some poisoned berries.”

“I thought you didn’t read the book.”

“Well, no, but I saw the movie.”

  Fangs groaned. “Okay, so you know how much it’s going to suck if we have to die out here.”

“We won’t die out here,” Sweet Pea repeated. “We’ll just keep walking, and eventually, we’ll find someone.  It’s not like we’re lost in the Alaskan wilderness or something.”

“Nah, just Upstate New York.  If we were in Alaska, we’d at least have a cool story after this.”

“How about this—we turn it into a cool story.” Sweet Pea rifled through his backpack and pulled out a notebook, a journal, really, with a leather cover and ‘Sweet Pea’ embossed in silver script on the front.

“Hold up for a second, dude, is that a journal?”

“What’s it to you?” Sweet Pea snapped, opening it up to a page near the middle. “It comes in handy.”

“And let me guess—it was a gift from your lovely girlfriend, and you only use it out of guilt.”

“Hey, shut it, dumbass.  She was right—it is good for getting your thoughts out in a less destructive way.  Not to mention, it really does come in handy sometimes, like now.”

Fangs was still smirking, shaking his head in amusement. “And tell me, Pea, what are we going to do with it?”

“Tell our story,” Sweet Pea answered as if it were obvious. “You know, in case we die and this is all they find.  People need to know how we went out so they can make a movie about us someday.”

“They’re not going to make a movie about us, Sweet Pea.” He sat up a little straighter. “In case they do, though, can you make a note that I’d like to be played by Diego Boneta.”

“Diego Boneta?”

“Yeah, he’s hot as fuck, and Latino.  Still light enough to be white-passing, because of course this will be a low budget, shitty movie with conventionally attractive B-level celebrities, but still technically Latino so it won’t be _total_ white-washing.”

“Wow,” Sweet Pea drawled, making the note on the top of the page. “You’ve, um—you’ve thought about this.”

“Hell yeah, I have.  Haven’t you ever considered who you’d want to play you in a movie?”

“Not really, no.”

“Well then, put down Avan Jogia,” Fangs said assertively. “Wrong race, and he doesn’t really look like you, but I feel like he could capture you well.”

Sweet Pea shook his head and wrote it down.  “Fine, now that we’ve preemptively made our requests for our portrayals, let’s get to the story.  We need to be sure to hype it up, though, because we’re never going to get a movie made about us if we go down in history as two dumbasses who didn’t know how to read a map or set up a tent.”

“True that.” He leaned forward, scooting closer to Sweet Pea so he could see what he was writing. “So we definitely start with a bear attack.”

“ _Start_ with a bear attack? That’s so dumb—we’d never survive that.”

“Fine, then we start with the storm—the timeline won’t add up, but no one will care when we’re dead.”

“Now that’s a plan.”

* * *

 

**_Sunday, 7am_ **

“Fangs, Sweet Pea, what the heck are you doing out here?”

Sleepily, the boys came to life, uncurling from each other just to be blinded by the morning sun.  Fangs got his eyes open first, and he sat up to see a familiar face with big glasses and a bigger hat.

“Dilton Doiley?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” the shorter boy said, peering inquisitively over the edge of the hammock. “What’s going on here?  You guys look terrible.”

Sweet Pea lurched upright, his hair wild and his eyes dark. “What the fuck?  Doiley?  Wha—where—”

“How did you find us?” Fangs asked, filling in where Sweet Pea couldn’t. “We’ve been lost for days.”

Dilton gave them an unimpressed look and took a step back, his face wrinkling like he smelt something foul. “You’re literally two miles out of town.  This is the path I take on my Sunday morning hikes.  I mean, you’re practically in sight of the trailhead.”

“What the—” Sweet Pea hopped out of his sleeping bag and onto the dewy grass below. “How—”

Dilton scoffed and jerked his thumb towards the trail just a few yards away. “Trail’s that way.  Good luck.”

Fangs and Sweet Pea just stood there, dumbfounded, until Dilton was out of sight.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sweet Pea said.

“We’re idiots,” Fangs added.

“Like, major idiots.”

“You know that journal of yours, burn it.”

“Will do.”

* * *

 

**_Sunday, 7pm_ **

“C’mon, Pea, just tell us how it was,” Toni pleaded, curling up on Sweet Pea’s couch as she waited for him to finish getting dressed after a shower. “It sounds like you and Fangs had fun.”

“No,” Sweet Pea said sternly, glancing out of the bathroom to see Toni sprawled on the couch. “It was bro time—I can’t tell you about it.”

“Fine, fine,” she drawled.  Then, she spotted the journal that his girlfriend had given him lying on the coffee table.  It looked banged up, like it had been on a certain camping trip.  Quietly, she slipped it off the table and onto her lap, opening it to the last page with writing.  As she read, her eyes widened.

“Day Two, the end is near,” she muttered. “The storm washed away the compass, and now…” She called into the bathroom, “Sweet Pea, did you guys get lost?”

“Wait—what?” Sweet Pea ducked out of the bathroom, still wrapped in a towel. “Wait, no, you can’t read that!”

“We’ve ruined the map,” she read loudly, trying to hold back her laughter, “and we can hear bears nearby.  This may be the end.”

“Toni, stop!” Clutching the towel in one hand, he darted across the trailer, reaching for the journal.  Toni was quick, though, and she kept managing to duck out of reach.

“And for our portrayal, Diego Boneta as Fangs, and—” she broke down, falling back on Sweet Pea’s bed as peals of laughter overtook her. “Avan Jogia as Sweet Pea.”

Sweet Pea snatched the journal, somehow managing to keep his towel firmly around his waist. “Tell anyone, Topaz, and you’re dead.”

“Oh hell no,” she laughed. “Seeing as you’re decidedly not dead, I’m telling everyone.”

“Topaz, I swear, I’ll—”

“You’ll what, hit me with the pieces of your unassembled tent?” She darted around him, reclaiming the journal and taking off toward the door. “See ya, later, Pea!”

“Where are you going?” he demanded, coming to an abrupt halt at the door—he had already exposed himself to enough people this weekend.

“To the Wyrm!” She shouted, climbing on her bike. “I’m inviting everyone for a dramatic reading of this journal!”

Still clutching his towel, Sweet Pea watched her pull out. “I hate you, Toni!”

“Love you too, Sweet Pea!”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out my other works!


End file.
